Domingos would never accept an act of kindness without some token of its recognition—a pineapple, a box of chocolates or an evening at the pub where they would sit talking while Domingos drank a frothing glass of ale and popped red glace cherries into Marcia’s avocat.

Sometimes they would sit in the sunny courtyard. Winter was over and the lean cat stretched itself out, stalking something in the hedges. Yes, winter was over, the ice had melted, the snow had thawed. The crocuses were pushing out of the earth where they had been imprisoned for so long. A woman beckoned Marcia from one of the windows. The pale sunlight fell across her white shoulders as she leaned over the ledge. She was in the room of one of the African students. Marcia went up to her and she started talking. They asked each other questions and the woman began reading aloud from the open pages of her life. She unfolded sentences from the first page, then the second—a life that would, like all their lives, be important only to herself and to the casual lovers she had in those momentary and transient encounters. But she was to remain forever in Marcia’s mind, a painting of a woman within a window frame, in a white slip, the sunlight falling like wings of light on the silk of her skin.

‘Why are you so open,’ Domingos chided Marcia when she returned to the stone bench, ‘you talk to everyone.’

When Marcia had first come to the university village, she had smiled at a stranger, someone who she thought was a post-graduate student, someone who appeared to come from nearer home. He crossed over to speak to her. He wasn’t a student. He was from Pakistan but had settled down in Glasgow and was the owner of a restaurant. He became very friendly, but within that friendliness there was too easy a familiarity.

‘Can I come up to your room?’ he asked.

‘No, I have work,’ Marcia replied.

‘When can I come to see you?’ he persisted. ‘Tomorrow? When, when?’

What did he think of her? Another Asian, someone with whom he could share his feelings of homesickness? He kept returning. Marcia retreated into silence. She hid from him.

Late one night, he came to the door of her apartment and rang the bell. He kept his finger pressed on it. The building was silent, everyone asleep. Marcia peeped from behind the curtain of her room with beating heart. He would not go away. Her heart thumped. She was filled with trepidation. Marcia felt he would wake up the whole apartment but there was only the silence of its sleeping occupants. He did not move for ages and ages. At last he turned to go. He walked away but kept looking back over his shoulder as if the windows, the doors would open for him to be invited in.

He returned one morning.

‘Tell him I’m not here. Gone to London,’ she entreated her flatmates with great cowardice.